“We were told a certain Jiro Takezo is in this neighborhood, sir,” said Gentile.
“That’s exciting to know,” the detective responded, planting one bare foot up on the planks and making the major effort it took to step up to the walkway where he swayed, ominously, for a moment.
“Are you well, sir?” asked the bodyguard.
“That’s a good one.”
“Are you Jiro Takezo?” asked Gentile.
“Never heard of him.” He was concerned with the slight tilt of the sidewalk. He wasn’t sure if it actually did have a slight tilt and didn’t want to ask them. He took a couple of steps and went off the planks into the dusty street, trying to make it seem like it was all his own idea. “Anything to drink?”
“We have water,” said the Italian.
“Don’t want a bath.”
“Sure of that?” questioned Sanada.
“We met in the rain,” Gentile reminded him. “After the theater.”
“I hate theater,” said the terminally hung-over ronin. “Actors are boils. Audiences are the pus that spurts out.”
The ronin grunted self-agreement and didn’t quite wobble across the street and towards the corner. The area was nearly empty: just a single watchman sitting on a crate in the shade of a sagging overhang two cross streets away and a man in a bandanna with a stack of wood over his shoulder, trudging along.
He recalled an alley that led to a stable and then to a little shop that sold soggy buns and sake. The Italian and Sanada followed behind at a little distance.
“You are Takezo-san, yes?” Gentile called to him.
“Not sure who I am,” was the reply, made without turning around. It was enough to walk steady and straight. “Maybe I used to be. Who cares?” Then he paused and swayed a little. “You speak better than the other ones.”
“You found them.”
“Lost them, too. Well, the fire-haired one. Lost him. Lost a lot of people in various ways.” Started walking again, into the alley and around a short bend. The rich stink of the stable was heavy in the hot, wet air. “I’m bad luck.” Rubbed his face. “I sent the black man away to be safe. Who knows? I’m bad luck.”
“I hope not,” demurred Gentile.
“The black one is very strong.”
“He’s quite muscular.”
“When we say strong we mean talented.”
“Io capisco. I see.” They were side-by-side now with the bodyguard a little behind.
“You were trying to help Colin.”
“Was I? My help can doom you.” He spat except he was so dry there was no effect. “I like the black one better. Anyway, I’m busy, now. Where’s that water?” Gentile handed him a small jug which he rinsed his mouth out with. Then he spat and made a face. “Now my mouth tastes worse.”
They’d come to the little shop where ragged, stained and yellowing half-curtains and banner strips, written on in clumsy characters, barely moved in the sodden shifts of air.
“Sir,” Gentile said, “why are you here in such a state? Lord Izu sent me to speak with you.”
Takezo had a suspicion his skull had, somehow, been filled with thick, lukewarm porridge. Decided that was the best part of how he felt. He was aware of not thinking about Miou yet, not even letting her name form.
“Izu,” he said, as they went inside. “Does he want us to watch the moonrise together?”
“Why are you staying here?”
“It’s nice here,” Takezo said.
Gentile paused in the doorway to glance around at the dilapidated buildings; a stack of broken barrels; an overgrown vacant lot; a skinny black and white dog sleeping in the dust…
“Very nice,” he agreed, following Takezo into the dim, dank interior.
“So she’s dead,” the detective said, tangentially. “Who knows if she even loved me?”
They both sat on stools at a table about two feet high which was a rare pleasure for Gentile. Takezo rested his long sword against the side of the table and squinted at the shopkeeper, a middle-aged man with small mouth, eyes and nose. Sporting, the ronin decided, ten thousand tiny moles on the rest of his almost featureless face. For a moment he thought he might be having a drunkard’s vision. The man looked with faint contempt at the disheveled swordsman and irritated curiosity at the oddly dressed foreigner. Takezo assumed the man’s main business had to do with some kind of tekiya crookedness. There wouldn’t be much of a steady clientele in a section like this, otherwise. The tekiya crossed the often blurry border between legal and illegal forms of rent collection, protection and extortion and, like the gamblers – bakuto, were known for their strong corrupt links with various forms of local police. Probably traded in stolen goods from the warehouses or something…
“Love, well …” began Gentile. “What man truly understands it?”
He was pondering Lady Issa. He’d stayed in bed with her, that night, until dawn. He’d tried to leave earlier when the only light was a single lantern in the far corner that shone through the fine mosquito netting enclosing the mattress in a kind of gauzy mystery. She seemed asleep. As he’d carefully moved to dress himself she’d said:
‘A lover who bustles about and searches for his pocketbook, tangles his clothing and mutters to himself, is irritating.’ She was quoting from a pillow-book.
‘Forgive me,’ he’d said, sitting back down beside her, thinking how formal even a night of passion could be.
She’d touched his lips with a finger.
‘You are a tender man, foreigner. A rare thing.’
‘Is your husband tender?’
‘Don’t speak of him,’ she’d admonished.
One of her long, soft hands lay on his hairy chest. She was curling a bit around her finger.
‘I… as you wish, my lady.’
‘You are like a bear,’ she’d informed him.
‘Why did you …’
Her voice was a shrug:
‘No question to ask a lady.’
He gestured, looking at Takezo.
“I understand very little,” he said.
“Of women? Of love?” He peered up at the mole-struck face leaning towards them. “How about you?” he asked.
“You want prostitutes, eh?” was the response. “I can get them.”
“A man who understands,” Takezo said. “I want sake. To hell with romance.”
“La donna,” Gentile pronounced, thinking about Issa. “ha(?) sempre ragione.”
“Sake,” the host said and shuffled away.
“Cool,” the ronin called after him.
“I have been with both clans,” remarked Gentile. “As we say in my land: ‘if the smell is bad, so is the fish.’”
“That’s said here, too.”
Takezo shut his eyes and saw her body again: the wheel marks… blood… Popped them open and blinked hard. Sighed, unconsciously. Then growled, slammed his iron-hard palm on the tabletop with a crash that sent puffs of dust up from the cracks. The proprietor twisted around behind his counter and another male face, peered past a hanging, ragged curtain marking off an otherwise open room in the back. The filtered, hot daylight coming into the musty place through open shutters and warped wallboards showed part of a bald head but left the features shadowed.
“Settle down,” the owner called over.
The head withdrew behind the curtain again. Gentile wondered how many might be sitting back there. From the smell he thought maybe they kept animals at that end of the building.
The problem was Takezo’s headache, the memory of Miou, the musty, heavy heat and the years of his life that had added up to this. Just then, he had the patience of a scorpion.
“Settle yourself, you ugly lout!” the ronin barked. “Bring sake and be still.”
He knew that was unlike him. Sort of regretted it. Confirming his probable underworld associations, the man responded:
“Samurai bum. Who cares about you? Get out and rest in the street. You and your foreign devil, here.”
Gen
tile noted the bald head was back peering through a parting in the curtain. And there was another face, too, this time. A long one with a thick jaw and a bush of hair.
Takezo grunted and dropped a coin on the table. Gentile’s young man appeared in the front doorway, parting the greasy half-curtain there.
“Lord Izu hopes that you have discovered useful facts about the fate of Osan,” the Italian said, ignoring the developing set-to.
“I’ll discover some useful facts shortly,” Takezo snarled, “if no sake is brought forth, insolent shop-man.”
“Ha, ha,” said the insolent one. “Take your coin and go, eta.”
Gentile looked quizzical.
“Severe insult,” explained the detective. “Eta. Unclean.”
The two men Gentile had noted behind the rear curtain were now standing at the edge of this room near the counter. With a sigh Takezo got up and went over, sheathed sword in one hand. The man seemed unimpressed.
“Trouble, eh?” the man said.
“No,” was the reply. “Just sake. I have a headache. Feel sick. I apologize for my bad temper.” Jerked a bow. “Just sake.”
The man shook his head. The other two had moved closer: the bald one was stout and powerful, the second was lean, weathered. Both sported tattoos like bands around their upper arms, one for each criminal offense they’d committed.
“Get out,” said the shopkeeper.
Takezo sighed, again. Flashed out his sword with the blade reversed so that the dull side was poised over the man’s shoulder. That way a blow could bruise, break a bone but not cut. The ronin chopped down, not hard but with the idea of just making a quiet point.
But in a practiced blur the small-featured fellow had a 3-pronged jittu in each hand and caught the easy downstroke in one, twisting it to lock the blade while he viciously jabbed at Takezo’s face with the other.
A mistake, because he should have tried for the momentarily pinned forearm. He leaned forward too far. His target, waking from the remnants of his hung-over stupor, even as his left arm moved in that seemingly casual way and didn’t seem as fast as it actually was, caught the shopkeeper’s outstretched wrist, stopping the weapon an inch from his eye, simultaneously wrenching his sword free from the pin in a shower of sparks.
More good fighters among the Bakuto, he thought. Small wonder Yazu wants to learn…
He gave the man a punitive crack on the head with the swordhilt, noting that Gentile’s young samurai guard had his own problems: his blade had been tangled by the bald man’s weighted chain while his companion whipped his metal lozenge at his head. He had to go to one knee to escape the blow without releasing his sword.
The Italian had drawn the five-foot long rapier and flung himself forward in a long lunge and shout and got the tip into the bald man’s armpit. The fellow dropped his chain and fell back, startled and bleeding profusely. He and his companion fled into the rear and could be heard clattering outside into the still, hot, heavy afternoon.
“What nonsense,” declared the ronin, taking up a sake jug from behind the counter where the keeper lay sighing and muttering under his breath. “Come, we earned this.”
Went back to the table and sat, heavily. Poured drinks for the three of them looking generally at the doorway where the brightness, gathered around the center-slit half-curtains, angled in the lower half of the door. Streamers of sun that slotted through the loosely spaced and warped wall planks made brilliant, golden blades in the dustmotes.
The bodyguard went and sat by the wall. They drank in silence, for a while, Takezo occasionally studying the Italian gentleman. Lifted and studied the rapier Gentile had laid across the uneven table after wiping the tip. Nodded with understanding.
“Could penetrate light armor,” he commented.
“You people fight in robes most of the time,” Gentile returned.
“Not in battle. But light armor is best. It’s all timing. If you are willing to die you can cut almost anyone.”
“Ah. I am not a soldier. Though I was schooled in fighting.”
“Think I am a soldier? Anyway, why are you here?”
“The murders of the women seem tied together.”
“This is news already carved in stone,” snorted the detective.
“The Lady Issa is troubled. She thinks you know more than you’ve revealed.”
Her name made Takezo uneasy. A memory came to consciousness of her lips on his genitals as he rocked between waking and sleep, the soothing rain pouring over the closed palanquin.
“You are close to her?’ he inquired. “Or is it common knowledge in the clan.”
He noted the Italian’s fleeting discomfort as he tilted back a full cup of sake before answering.
“Well, I …” he began. “Close would be …”
As he shifted himself in his seat a stray sunbeam touched the side of his face outlining his long, slightly arched nose and shadowing the rest of his head.
“Not common knowledge,” affirmed Takezo.
“No,” agreed the other man. “She suggested I ask you and… so …”
“Hmn,” grunted the detective, dismissively. “I wonder how long I have been drunk? I had a hope, you see …” Gentile realized a deep feeling was surfacing in the Japanese. “Well, a hope… to live a life that… but now it is all so trivial. Makes a man sick.” He raised a fist but didn’t pound the table as Gentile expected. “In the pond dead leaves gather… time takes autumn’s form …” Poured and drank another cup. “If I could challenge time, you see, my friend, I’d cut his head off!” Takezo hissed. “He has taken everything… everything …” Shook his head like a wet animal. “I’m supposed to be clever and yet I cannot duel with time… why, money to me is dog dirt …” He chuckled. “Issa’s a whore,” he concluded. “Sells herself for power.”
“Sir?” murmured the Italian, nervously.
“Miou was not a whore… very subtle and commanding distinction… Miou had no price, you see?… Human life is food and drink and love and dogdirt… Reiko’s a bigger whore than anybody. He sells himself for… for …” Couldn’t find the words and he shouldn’t be even close to drunk, yet. Not really. Or maybe, he vaguely conceived, the wine just unlocked the madness and fury that could smash down reason’s door by itself…
Gentile would later note in his journals how powerfully these people suppressed massive feelings. There was an obvious comparison with the Spartans. Maybe their violence was so extreme because they were imprisoned by the custom of closing them in.
Ah, I wish I could have discussed these things with Osan, he thought. The idea that he’d slept with her mother created a strange feeling of unease and, yet, pleasure that he had, somehow connected with her – absurd, of course, but a feeling is a feeling. I am like this angry man, here, he reasoned on, in that I have tried to contain myself… pitifully trying to think my way through what I should have only felt… and so I slept with Issa wishing it were her child while pretending to myself it was not so…
He wished he were working on the painting. More and more he’d find himself visualizing the composition, the characters… He’d blocked in the general area where Osan would appear. He wasn’t ready to sketch her in but knew it was going to be a stylized figure, maybe like the Madonnas of earlier centuries…
Issa, too… he saw her lying voluptuously, golden body naked and in stark, almost metallic color as if her flesh were wrought from smooth and perfect precious metal, her face a mask with eyes like actual jewels… above her would loom the storm that seemed to rain blood in scattered gusts, the storm that whipped and whirled around the fighting horsemen and soldiers on the black, hellish battlefield where the lone samurai (a spot of purest white like a fading gleam of hope and purity) stabbed himself to death… .
He shook his head, swallowed more wine, and chuckled at his own absurdity.
Takezo glanced at him, grim and blurry.
“Will those men return with others?” Gentile asked, practically.
“I hope so
,” said the ronin. He considered the Italian. “Suppose she isn’t dead. How would you like that?”
“You mean, Osan?”
“It’s how you say her name. I noticed it.”
Gentile waved his hands.
“You believe I love a dead woman?” he exclaimed.
“It’s how you say her name.” He held his sake cup up to his face and squinted at his reflection, featureless and partial outline that, he dully thought, needed to be filled in. “Anyway, I love a dead woman, myself.”
“I see.”
“They murdered her… they murdered the others …” Sneered at the half-empty cup and the hint of him in it. “Is this a life for a man?” Set the cup down, carefully, as if it mattered. “I don’t know how to feel… we had plans, you see… plans …”
“Don’t you want to find out who are the killers?” He was remembering something Osan had written – which he did all the time. Something about once men get into the habit of killing, people can be crushed like insects in a garden.
He realized there were others like this bitter, grieving man whom he could speak with about these matters but he often found himself imagining conversations with Osan, a kind of almost literary conceit, he realized.
“I know them,” Takezo replied, staring at nothing, now. “So many to slay …”
He knew he liked to think killing was always forced on him. Maybe it was. He wasn’t sure, anymore.
An excuse that won’t fool the keepers of destiny, he thought. Ah, the sword sticks to your hands, once you pick it up…
He stood with a slightly wobbly violence, staring at nothing. “Maybe I might have saved Miou,” he murmured. “But my stupidity is nearly perfect. I have labored on it.”
The Italian stood up, not sure he followed Takezo on all points. The bodyguard, Sanada, offered them water from a hanging jug and everyone drank deep. It was tepid but clean-tasting.
Takezo noted the shopkeeper had crawled out of the room and was gone. He assumed they’d sent for reinforcements – or even the police, depending on where they actually stood among the criminal groups.
Sanada had found a tray of buns covered by a cloth behind the counter and passed them around. They were stale and spongy but Takezo was hungry enough to eat three, munching as they went outside into the bright, cloudless heat. The street was empty except for the black and white dog still sleeping in the shade across the way.
Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha Page 20